Wednesday Wisdom – June 10, 2014

Hope you are enjoying June.
Here’s the wisdom I’ve found for this week.

Mark 4:26-34

4:26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,

4:27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.

4:28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.

4:29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

4:30 He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?

4:31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;

4:32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

4:33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it;

4:34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

~~~

Everyone has a life that is different from the “I” of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the “I” who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. It takes time and hard experience to sense the difference between the two—to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience I call my life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged.

“I am wronging no one,” you say, “I am merely holding on to what is mine.” What is yours! Who gave it to you so that you could bring it into life with you? Why, you are like a man who pinches a seat at the theater at the expense of latecomers, claiming ownership of what was for common use. That’s what the rich are like; having seized what belongs to all, they claim it as their own on the basis of having got there first. Whereas if everyone took for himself enough to meet his immediate needs and released the rest for those in need of it, there would be no rich and no poor.

I can tell by the way the trees beat, afterso many dull days, on my worried windowpanesthat a storm is coming,and I hear the far-off fields say thingsI can’t bear without a friend,I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives onacross the woods and across time,and the world looks as if it had no age:the landscape like a line in the psalm book,is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!What fights us is so great!If only we would let ourselves be dominatedas things do by some immense storm,we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,and the triumph itself makes us small.What is extraordinary and eternaldoes not want to be bent by us.I mean the Angel who appearedto the wrestlers of the Old Testament:when the wrestler’s sinewsgrew long like metal strings,he felt them under his fingerslike chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel(who often simply declined the fight)went away proud and strengthenedand great from that harsh hand,that kneaded him as if to change his shape.Winning does not tempt that man.This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,by constantly greater beings.